#computational cosmology | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

whats-in-a-sentence · 8 months ago

Text

Thus, conditions at the birth of the universe are critical to directing time's arrow. The future is indeed the direction of increasing entropy. The arrow of time – the fact that things start like this and end like that but never start like that and end like this – began its flight in the highly ordered, low-entropy state of the universe at its inception.¹⁸

18. Throughout this chapter, we've spoken of the arrow of time, referring to the apparent fact that there is an asymmetry along the time axis (any observer's time axis) of spacetime: a huge variety of sequences of events is arrayed in one order along the time axis, but the reverse ordering of such events seldom, if every, occurs. Over the rate, physicists and philosophers have divided these sequences of events into subcategories whose temporal asymmetries might, in principle, be subject to logically independent explanations. For example, heat flows from hot objects to cooler ones, not not from cool objects to hot ones; electromagnetic waves emanate outward from sources like stars and lightbulbs, but seem never to converge inward on such sources; the universe appears to be uniformly expanding, and not contracting; and we remember the past and not the future (these are called the thermodynamic, electromagnetic, cosmological, and psychological arrows of time, respectively). All of these are time-asymmetric phenomena, but they might, in principle, acquire their time asymmetry from completely different physical properties. My view, one that many share (but others don't), is that except possibly for the cosmological arrow, these temporally asymmetric phenomena are not fundamentally different, and ultimately are subject to the same explanation – the one we've described in this chapter.

For example, why does electromagnetic radiation travel in expanding outward waves but not contracting inward waves, even though both are perfectly good solutions to Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism? Well, because our universe has low-entropy, coherent, ordered sources for such outward waves – stars and lightbulbs, to name two – and the existence of these ordered sources derives from the even more ordered environment at the universe's inception, as discussed in the main text. The psychological arrow of time is harder to address since there is so much about the microphysical basis of human thought that we've yet to understand. But much progress has been made in understanding the arrow of time when it comes to computers – undertaking, completing, and then producing a record of a computation is a basic computational sequence whose entropic properties are well understood (as developed by Charles Bennett, Rolf Landauer, and others) and fit squarely within the second law of thermodynamics. Thus, if human thought can be likened to computational processes, a similar thermodynamic explanation may apply. Notice, too, that the asymmetry associated with the face that the universe is expanding and not contracting is related to, but logically distinct from, the arrow of time we've been exploring. If the universe's expansion were to slow down, stop, and then turn into a contraction, the arrow of time would still point in the same direction. Physical processes (eggs breaking, people aging, and so on) would still happen in the usual direction, even though the universe's expansion had reversed.

"The Fabric of the Cosmos" - Brian Greene

0 notes

jcmarchi · 1 year ago

Text

The many-body dynamics of cold atoms and cross-country running

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/the-many-body-dynamics-of-cold-atoms-and-cross-country-running/

The many-body dynamics of cold atoms and cross-country running

Newton’s third law of motion states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The basic physics of running involves someone applying a force to the ground in the opposite direction of their sprint.

For senior Olivia Rosenstein, her cross-country participation provides momentum to her studies as an experimental physicist working with 2D materials, optics, and computational cosmology.

An undergraduate researcher with Professor Richard Fletcher in his Emergent Quantum Matter Group, she is helping to build an erbium-lithium trap for studies of many-body physics and quantum simulation. The group’s focus during this past fall was increasing the trap’s number of erbium atoms and decreasing the atoms’ temperature while preparing the experiment’s next steps.

To this end, Rosenstein helped analyze the behavior of the apparatus’s magnetic fields, perform imaging of the atoms, and develop infrared (IR) optics for future stages of laser cooling, which the group is working on now.

As she wraps up her time at MIT, she also credits her participation on MIT’s Cross Country team as the key to keeping up with her academic and research workload.

“Running is an integral part of my life,” she says. “It brings me joy and peace, and I am far less functional without it.”

First steps

Rosenstein’s parents — a special education professor and a university director of global education programs — encouraged her to explore a wide range of subjects that included math and science. Her early interest in STEM included the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Engineering Outreach Society, where engineering students visit local elementary schools.

At Urbana High School, she was a cross-country runner — three-year captain of varsity cross country and track, and a five-time Illinois All-State athlete — whose coach taught advanced placement biology. “He did a lot to introduce me to the physiological processes that drive aerobic adaptation and how runners train,” she recalls.

So, she was leaning toward studying biology and physiology when she was applying to colleges. At first, she wasn’t sure she was “smart enough” for MIT.

“I figured everyone at MIT was probably way too stressed, ultracompetitive, and drowning in psets [problem sets], proposals, and research projects,” she says. But once she had a chance to talk to MIT students, she changed her mind.

“MIT kids work hard not because we’re pressured to, but because we’re excited about solving that nagging pset problem, or we get so engrossed in the lab that we don’t notice an extra hour has passed. I learned that people put a lot of time into their living groups, dance teams, music ensembles, sports, activism, and every pursuit in between. As a prospective student, I got to talk to some future cross-country teammates too, and it was clear that people here truly enjoy spending time together.”

Drawn to physics

As a first year, she was intent on Course 20, but then she found herself especially engaged with class 8.022 (Physics II: Electricity and Magnetism), taught by Professor Daniel Harlow.

“I remember there was one time he guided us to a conclusion with completely logical steps, then proceeded to point out all of the inconsistencies in the theory, and told us that unfortunately we would need relativity and more advanced physics to explain it, so we would all need to take those courses and maybe a couple grad classes and then we could come back satisfied.

“I thought, ‘Well shoot, I guess I have to go to physics grad school now.’ It was mostly a joke at the time, but he successfully piqued my interest.”

She compared the course requirements for bioengineering with physics and found she was more drawn to the physics classes. Plus, her time with remote learning also pushed her toward more hands-on activities.

“I realized I’m happiest when at least some of my work involves having something in front of me.”

The summer of her rising sophomore year, she worked in Professor Brian DeMarco’s lab at the University of Illinois in her hometown of Urbana.

“The group was constructing a trapped ion quantum computing apparatus, and I got to see how physics concepts could be used in practice,” she recalls. “I liked that experimentalists got to combine time studying theory with time building in the lab.”

She followed up with stints in Fletcher’s group, a MISTI internship in France with researcher Rebeca Ribeiro-Palau’s condensed matter lab, and an Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program project working on computational cosmology projects with Professor Mark Vogelsberger’s group at the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, reviewing the evolution of galaxies and dark matter halos in self-interacting dark-matter simulations.

By the spring of her junior year, she was especially drawn to doing atomic, molecular, and optical (AMO) experiments experiments in class 8.14 (Experimental Physics II), the second semester of Junior Lab.

“Experimental AMO is a lot of fun because you get to study very interesting physics — things like quantum superposition, using light to slow down atoms, and unexplored theoretical effects — while also building real-world, tangible systems,” she says. “Achieving a MOT [magneto-optical trap] is always an exciting phase in an experiment because you get to see quantum mechanics at work with your own eyes, and it’s the first step towards more complex manipulations of the atoms. Current AMO research will let us test concepts that have never been observed before, adding to what we know about how atoms interact at a fundamental level.”

For the exploratory project, Rosenstein and her lab partner, Nicolas Tanaka, chose to build a MOT for rubidium using JLab’s ColdQuanta MiniMOT kit and laser locking through modulation transfer spectroscopy. The two presented at the class’s poster session to the department and won the annual Edward C. Pickering Award for Outstanding Original Project.

“We wanted the experience working with optics and electronics, as well as to create an experimental setup for future student use,” she says. “We got a little obsessed — at least one of us was in the lab almost every hour it was open for the final two weeks of class. Seeing a cloud of rubidium finally appear on our IR TV screen filled us with excitement, pride, and relief. I got really invested in building the MOT, and felt I could see myself working on projects like this for a long time in the future.”

She added, “I enjoyed the big questions being asked in cosmology, but couldn’t get over how much fun I had in the lab, getting to use my hands. I know some people can’t stand assembling optics, but it’s kind of like Legos for me, and I’m happy to spend an afternoon working on getting the mirror alignment just right and ignoring the outside world.”

As a senior, Rosenstein’s goal is to collect experience in experimental optics and cold atoms in preparation for PhD work. “I’d like to combine my passion for big physics questions and AMO experiments, perhaps working on fundamental physics tests using precision measurement, or tests of many-body physics.”

Simultaneously, she’s wrapping up her cosmology research, finishing a project in partnership with Katelin Schutz at McGill University, where they are testing a model to interpret 21-centimeter radio wave signals from the earliest stages of the universe and inform future telescope measurements. Her goal is to see how well an effective field theory (EFT) model can predict 21cm fields with a limited amount of information.

“The EFT we’re using was originally applied to very large-scale simulations, and we had hoped it would still be effective for a set of smaller simulations, but we found that this is not the case. What we want to know now, then, is how much data the simulation would have to have for the model to work. The research requires a lot of data analysis, finding ways to extract and interpret meaningful trends.”

“It’s even more exciting knowing that the effects we’re seeing are related to the story of our universe, and the tools we’re developing could be used by astronomers to learn even more.”

Running past a crisis

Rosenstein credits her participation in cross country for getting through the pandemic, which delayed setting foot on MIT’s campus until spring 2021.

“The team did provide my main form of social interaction,” she says. “We were sad we didn’t get to compete, but I ran a time trial that was my fastest mile up to that point, which was a small win.”

In her sophomore year, her 38th-place finish at nationals secured her a spot as a National Collegiate Athletic Association All-American in her first collegiate cross-country season. A stress fracture curtailed her running for a bit until placing 12th as an NCAA DIII All-American. (The women’s team placed seventh overall, and the men’s team won MIT’s first NCAA national title.) When another injury sidelined her, she mentored first-year students as team captain and stayed engaged however she could, while biking and swimming to maintain training. She hopes to keep running in her life.

“Both running and physics deal a lot with delayed gratification: you’re not going to run a personal record every day, and you’re not going to publish a groundbreaking discovery every day. Sometimes you might go months or even years without feeling like you’ve made a big jump in your progress. If you can’t take that, you won’t make it as a runner or as a physicist.

“Maybe that makes it sound like runners and physicists are just grinding away, enduring constant suffering in pursuit of some grand goal. But there’s a secret: It isn’t suffering. Running every day is a privilege and a chance to spend time with friends, getting away from other work. Aligning optics, debugging code, and thinking through complex problems isn’t a day in the life of a masochist, just a satisfying Wednesday afternoon.”

She adds, “Cross country and physics both require a combination of naive optimism and rigorous skepticism. On the one hand, you have to believe you’re fully capable of winning that race or getting those new results, otherwise, you might not try at all. On the other hand, you have to be brutally honest about what it’s going to take because those outcomes won’t happen if you aren’t diligent with your training or if you just assume your experimental setup will work exactly as planned. In all, running and physics both consist of minute daily progress that integrates to a big result, and every infinitesimal segment is worth appreciating.”

0 notes

mysticstronomy · 2 months ago

Text

DO 'COMPLETE DARK' DARK MATTER HALOS EXIST??

Blog#497

Welcome back,

Wednesday, April 16th, 2025.Every galaxy is thought to form at the center of a dark matter halo—a region of gravitationally bound matter that extends far beyond the visible boundaries of a galaxy. Stars are formed when gravity within dark matter halos draws in gas, but astrophysicists don't yet know whether star-free dark matter halos exist.

Now Ethan Nadler, a computational astrophysicist at UC San Diego, has calculated the mass below which halos fail to form stars. This work was done using analytic predictions from galaxy formation theory and cosmological simulations.

The study, titled "The Impact of Molecular Hydrogen Cooling on the Galaxy Formation Threshold," was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and was led by Ethan Nadler.

"Historically, our understanding of dark matter has been linked to its behavior in galaxies. A detection of completely dark halos would open up a new window to study the universe," stated Nadler.

Previously, this threshold for star formation was thought to be between 100 million to 1 billion solar masses due to cooling of atomic hydrogen gas. Nadler's research shows that star formation can occur in halos down to 10 million solar masses through molecular hydrogen cooling.

With the Rubin Observatory coming online later this year and JWST already making unprecedented observations of our universe, there will soon be new data to test these predictions and reveal whether completely dark halos exist. This may have far-reaching consequences for cosmology and the nature of dark matter.

Originally published on https://phys-org.cdn.ampproject.org

COMING UP!!

(Saturday, April 19th, 2025)

"WHERE DID THE UNIVERSE COME FROM??"q

#astronomy #outer space #alternate universe #astrophysics #universe #spacecraft #white universe #space #parallel universe #astrophotography

71 notes · View notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 11 months ago

Text

FTC vs surveillance pricing

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

In the mystical cosmology of economics, "prices" are of transcendental significance, the means by which the living market knows and adapts itself, giving rise to "efficient" production and consumption.

At its most basic level, the metaphysics of pricing goes like this: if there is less of something for sale than people want to buy, the seller will raise the price until enough buyers drop out and demand equals supply. If the disappointed would-be buyers are sufficiently vocal about their plight, other sellers will enter the market (bankrolled by investors who sense an opportunity), causing supplies to increase and prices to fall until the system is in "equilibrium" – producing things as cheaply as possible in precisely the right quantities to meet demand. In the parlance of neoclassical economists, prices aren't "set": they are discovered.

In antitrust law, there are many sins, but they often boil down to "price setting." That is, if a company has enough "market power" that they can dictate prices to their customers, they are committing a crime and should be punished. This is such a bedrock of neoclassical economics that it's a tautology "market power" exists where companies can "set prices"; and to "set prices," you need "market power."

Prices are the blood cells of the market, shuttling nutrients (in the form of "information") around the sprawling colony organism composed of all the buyers, sellers, producers, consumers, intermediaries and other actors. Together, the components of this colony organism all act on the information contained in the "price signals" to pursue their own self-interest. Each self-interested action puts more information into the system, triggering more action. Together, price signals and the actions they evince eventually "discover" the price, an abstraction that is yanked out of the immaterial plane of pure ideas and into our grubby, physical world, causing mines to re-open, shipping containers and pipelines to spark to life, factories to retool, trucks to fan out across the nation, retailers to place ads and hoist SALE banners over their premises, and consumers to race to those displays and open their wallets.

When prices are "distorted," all of this comes to naught. During the notorious "socialist calculation debate" of 1920s Austria, right-wing archdukes of religious market fundamentalism, like Von Hayek and Von Mises, trounced their leftist opponents, arguing that the market was the only computational system capable of calculating how much of each thing should be made, where it should be sent, and how much it should be sold for.

Attempts to "plan" the economy – say, by subsidizing industries or limiting prices – may be well-intentioned, but they broke the market's computations and produced haywire swings of both over- and underproduction. Later, the USSR's planned economy did encounter these swings. These were sometimes very grave (famines that killed millions) and sometimes silly (periods when the only goods available in regional shops were forks, say, creating local bubbles in folk art made from forks).

Unplanned markets do this too. Most notoriously, capitalism has produced a vast oversupply of carbon-intensive goods and processes, and a huge undersupply of low-carbon alternatives, bringing the human civilization to the brink of collapse. Not only have capitalism's price signals failed to address this existential crisis to humans, it has also sown the seeds of its own ruin – the market computer's not going to be getting any "price signals" from people as they drown in floods or roast to death on sidewalks that deliver second-degree burns to anyone who touches them:

https://www.fastcompany.com/91151209/extreme-heat-southwest-phoenix-surface-burns-scorching-pavement-sidewalks-pets

For market true believers, these failures are just evidence that regulation is distorting markets, and that the answer is more unregulated markets to infuse the computer with more price signals. When it comes to carbon, the problem is that producers are "producing negative externalities" (that is, polluting and sticking us with the bill). If we can just get them to "internalize" those costs, they will become "economically rational" and switch to low-carbon alternatives.

That's the theory behind the creation and sale of carbon credits. Rather than ordering companies to stop risking civilizational collapse and mass extinction, we can incentivize them to do so by creating markets that reward clean tech and punish dirty practices. The buying and selling of carbon credits is supposed to create price signals reflecting the existential risk to the human race and the only habitable planet known to our species, which the market will then "bring into equilibrium."

Unfortunately, reality has a distinct and unfair leftist bias. Carbon credits are a market for lemons. The carbon credits you buy to "offset" your car or flight are apt to come from a forest that has already burned down, or that had already been put in a perpetual trust as a wildlife preserve and could never be logged:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/18/greshams-carbon-law/#papal-indulgences

Carbon credits produce the most perverse outcomes imaginable. For example, much of Tesla's profitability has been derived from the sale of carbon credits to the manufacturers of the dirtiest, most polluting SUVs on Earth; without those Tesla credits, those SUVs would have been too expensive to sell, and would not have existed:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

What's more, carbon credits aren't part of an "all of the above" strategy that incorporates direct action to prevent our species downfall. These market solutions are incompatible with muscular direct action, and if we do credits, we can't do other stuff that would actually work:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/31/carbon-upsets/#big-tradeoff

Even though price signals have repeatedly proven themselves to be an insufficient mechanism for producing "efficient" or even "survivable," they remain the uppermost spiritual value in the capitalist pantheon. Even through the last 40 years of unrelenting assaults on antitrust and competition law, the one form of corporate power that has remained both formally and practically prohibited is "pricing power."

That's why the DoJ was able to block tech companies and major movie studios from secretly colluding to suppress their employees' wages, and why those employees were able to get huge sums out of their employers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation

It's also why the Big Six (now Big Five) publishers and Apple got into so much trouble for colluding to set a floor on the price of ebooks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Apple_(2012)

When it comes to monopoly, even the most Bork-pilled, Manne-poisoned federal judges and agencies have taken a hard line on price-fixing, because "distortions" of prices make the market computer crash.

But despite this horror of price distortions, America's monopolists have found so many ways to manipulate prices. Last month, The American Prospect devoted an entire issue to the many ways that monopolies and cartels have rigged the prices we pay, pushing them higher and higher, even as our wages stagnated and credit became more expensive:

https://prospect.org/pricing

For example, there's the plague of junk fees (AKA "drip pricing," or, if you're competing to be first up against the wall come the revolution, "ancillary revenue"), everything from baggage fees from airlines to resort fees at hotels to the fee your landlord charges if you pay your rent by check, or by card, or in cash:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/07/drip-drip-drip/#drip-off

There's the fake transparency gambit, so beloved of America's hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/13/a-punch-in-the-guts/#hayek-pilled

The "greedflation" that saw grocery prices skyrocketing, which billionaire grocery plutes blamed on covid stimulus checks, even as they boasted to their shareholders about their pricing power:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-12-war-in-the-aisles/

There's the the tens of billions the banks rake in with usurious interest rates, far in excess of the hikes to the central banks' prime rates (which are, in turn, justified in light of the supposed excesses of covid relief checks):

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-11-what-we-owe/

There are the scams that companies like Amazon pull with their user interfaces, tricking you into signing up for subscriptions or upsells, which they grandiosely term "dark patterns," but which are really just open fraud:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-10-one-click-economy/

There are "surge fees," which are supposed to tempt more producers (e.g. Uber drivers) into the market when demand is high, but which are really just an excuse to gouge you – like when Wendy's threatens to surge-price its hamburgers:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-07-urge-to-surge/

And then there's surveillance pricing, the most insidious and profitable way to jack up prices. At its core, surveillance pricing uses nonconsensually harvested private information to inform an algorithm that reprices the things you buy – from lattes to rent – in real-time:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

Companies like Plexure – partially owned by McDonald's – boasts that it can use surveillance data to figure out what your payday is and then hike the price of the breakfast sandwich or after-work soda you buy every day.

Like every bad pricing practice, surveillance pricing has its origins in the aviation industry, which invested early on and heavily in spying on fliers to figure out how much they could each afford for their plane tickets and jacking up prices accordingly. Architects of these systems then went on to found companies like Realpage, a data-brokerage that helps landlords illegally collude to rig rent prices.

Algorithmic middlemen like Realpage and ATPCO – which coordinates price-fixing among the airlines – are what Dan Davies calls "accountability sinks." A cartel sends all its data to a separate third party, which then compares those prices and tells everyone how much to jack them up in order to screw us all:

https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/

These price-fixing middlemen are everywhere, and they predate the boom in commercial surveillance. For example, Agri-Stats has been helping meatpackers rig the price of meat for 40 years:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

But when you add commercial surveillance to algorithmic pricing, you get a hybrid more terrifying than any cocaine-sharks (or, indeed, meth-gators):

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tennessee-police-warn-locals-not-flush-drugs-fear-meth-gators-n1030291

Apologists for these meth-gators insist that surveillance pricing's true purpose is to let companies offer discounts. A streaming service can't afford to offer $0.99 subscriptions to the poor because then all the rich people would stop paying $19.99. But with surveillance pricing, every customer gets a different price, titrated to their capacity to pay, and everyone wins.

But that's not how it cashes out in the real world. In the real world, rich people who get ripped off have the wherewithal to shop around, complain effectively to a state AG, or punish companies by taking their business elsewhere. Meanwhile, poor people aren't just cash-poor, they're also time-poor and political influence-poor.

When the dollar store duopoly forces all the mom-and-pop grocers in your town out of business with predatory pricing, and creating food deserts that only they serve, no one cares, because state AGs and politicians don't care about people who shop at dollar stores. Then, the dollar stores can collude with manufacturers to get shrunken "cheater sized" products that sell for a dollar, but cost double or triple the grocery store price by weight or quantity:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

Yes, fliers who seem to be flying on business (last-minute purchasers who don't have a Saturday stay) get charged more than people whose purchase makes them seem to be someone flying away for a vacation. But that's only because aviation prices haven't yet fully transitioned to surveillance pricing. If an airline can correctly calculate that you are taking a trip because you're a grad student who must attend a conference in order to secure a job, and if they know precisely how much room you have left on your credit card, they can charge you everything you can afford, to the cent.

Your ability to resist pricing power isn't merely a function of a company's market power – it's also a function of your political power. Poor people may have less to steal, but no one cares when they get robbed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/19/martha-wright-reed/#capitalists-hate-capitalism

So surveillance pricing, supercharged by algorithms, represent a serious threat to "prices," which is the one thing that the econo-religious fundamentalists of the capitalist class value above all else. That makes surveillance pricing low-hanging fruit for regulatory enforcement: a bipartisan crime that has few champions on either side of the aisle.

Cannily, the FTC has just declared war on surveillance pricing, ordering eight key players in the industry (including capitalism's arch-villains, McKinsey and Jpmorgan Chase) to turn over data that can be used to prosecute them for price-fixing within 45 days:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/07/ftc-issues-orders-eight-companies-seeking-information-surveillance-pricing

As American Prospect editor-in-chief David Dayen notes in his article on the order, the FTC is doing what he and his journalistic partners couldn't: forcing these companies to cough up internal data:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-07-24-ftc-opens-surveillance-pricing-inquiry/

This is important, and not just because of the wriggly critters the FTC will reveal as they use their powers to turn over this rock. Administrative agencies can't just do whatever they want. Long before the agencies were neutered by the Supreme Court, they had strict rules requiring them to gather evidence, solicit comment and counter-comment, and so on, before enacting any rules:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

Doubtless, the Supreme Court's Loper decision (which overturned "Chevron deference" and cut off the agencies' power to take actions that they don't have detailed, specific authorization to take) will embolden the surveillance pricing industry to take the FTC to court on this. It's hard to say whether the courts will find in the FTC's favor. Section 6(b) of the FTC Act clearly lets the FTC compel these disclosures as part of an enforcement action, but they can't start an enforcement action until they have evidence, and through the whole history of the FTC, these kinds of orders have been a common prelude to enforcement.

One thing this has going for it is that it is bipartisan: all five FTC commissioners, including both Republicans (including the Republican who votes against everything) voted in favor of it. Price gouging is the kind of easy-to-grasp corporate crime that everyone hates, irrespective of political tendency.

In the Prospect piece on Ticketmaster's pricing scam, Dayen and Groundwork's Lindsay Owens called this the "Age of Recoupment":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/03/aoi-aoi-oh/#concentrated-gains-vast-diffused-losses

For 40 years, neoclassical economics' focus on "consumer welfare" meant that companies could cheat and squeeze their workers and suppliers as hard as they wanted, so long as prices didn't go up. But after 40 years, there's nothing more to squeeze out of workers or suppliers, so it's time for the cartels to recoup by turning on us, their customers.

They believe – perhaps correctly – that they have amassed so much market power through mergers and lobbying that they can cross the single bright line in neoliberal economics' theory of antitrust: price-gouging. No matter how sincere the economics profession's worship of prices might be, it still might not trump companies that are too big to fail and thus too big to jail.

The FTC just took an important step in defense of all of our economic wellbeing, and it's a step that even the most right-wing economist should applaud. They're calling the question: "Do you really think that price-distortion is a cardinal sin? If so, you must back our play." Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

https://clarionwriteathon.com/members/profile.php?writerid=293388

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/24/gouging-the-all-seeing-eye/#i-spy

#pluralistic #gouging #ftc #surveillance pricing #dynamic pricing #efficient market hypothesis brain worms #administrative procedures act #chevron deference #lina khan #price gouging

161 notes · View notes

tumblingxelian · 3 months ago

Text

Never be the Same (MLB AU)

Gabriel Agreste had an idea, Akumatize a brilliant doctor and see what wicked concoctions of disease their new form could conjure to overwhelm Ladybug and Chat Noir.

But the supervillain has flown to close to the sun as a strange sickness begins to suffuse not only him, but the world itself and this is not a plague that can be simply Miracle Cured away.

No, come what may, the world shall never be the same.

Can be read on AO3 or below the Read more:

Nooroo was pulled from their dormant slumber by a sharp invocation.

"Nooroo, explain yourself!"

Gabriel was furious, that was never a good sign.

Manifesting in an aroura of lavender light, Nooroo was greeted by the scowling visage of their holder. His skin seemed faintly flushed, but otherwise Gabriel was the same, grim and commanding visage he had been since they met.

"Well? Explain yourself," he rasped, clutching the Butterfly pendant in a vice like grip.

Were Nooroo more sardonic and less terrified, they might have felt inclined to roll their eyes, or begin rattling off the cosmological origins of the Kwami.

Instead, that sharp, furious voice just made them cringe backwards, "I don't know what you mean, mas-"

Nooroo barely dodged the swipe, which was clumsy, strange for someone usually as controlled and sharp as Gabriel.

"Do not toy with me creature, that last Akuma's inane disease has not faded when I revoked their power, instead it is spreading!"

Nooroo blinked trying to parse through the second hand memories but to no avail.

"Master I-"

"Nooroo, do not lie to me! Nooroo, explain what went wrong with the last Akuma, or be punished!"

Magic forced Nooroo's normally repressed emotions to the surface and the Kwami shouted, "I don't know!"

Gabriel actually drew himself back at that, the pendant clutched even more tightly in his hand, there was sweat on his brow, like he was ill.

Nooroo tried more gently "Master, my memories of your transformed state are vague, if you tell me more I will be happy to help-"

"Nooroo, silence." Nooroo's mouth snapped shut. "Nooroo, never, yell at me again." Nooroo bowed their head.

There was a long lingering moment before Gabriel sighed in obvious vexation, pinching the bridge of his nose, the man stalked around his secret abode, flicking on computer screens.

Some showed news articles talking about a strange sickness spreading across the world, others talked of Ladybug as well as other heroes trying and failing to cure the sickness and finally a singular screen flashed with a lone figure.

Doctor Lanora, PHD in Biology & Genetics.

Memories sparked, like the thoughts of a dream, "I remember this doctor, they were so angry because people were harassing them online!"

"Do you remember anything else?" Gabriel intoned gravelry.

Nooroo bit their lip, "Some vague things master, they had a theory, or an idea people were mocking them and they wanted to prove it right, you promised to help them and they became..."

"DNA-Dominator," Gabriel finished, "Those matters are not of my concern, nor are the fool doctors' asinine anxieties about their nonsense 'world building'" The words dripped with scorn, "Being mocked by a handful of equally imbecilic low lives. What I want to know is why has the Miracle Cure not undone the plague that they have wrought?"

Nooroo tapped their chin, memories becoming clearer and more firm as Gabriel spoke.

"You broke the connection early on, didn't you master?"

"I did, they were on the very edge of my radius and..." he cut himself off.

"Master I am only able to help you if-"

"Silence," he snapped, his face shifting through expressions so quickly Nooroo could barely follow, his very skin subtly shifting in tone with his fluctuating temperature.

Finally he said, "I felt... Something was travelling back through our connection, so I broke it, and removed the Akuma too for good measure."

Nooroo hummed, fluttering around the screens and hovering in front of the article titled, "Miracle Cure fails to Cure mutation" and things began to fall into place.

"Master, was the disease the Akuma made fueled by the Akuma, or merely shaped by it?"

Gabriel had that angry expression on his face. The one he had when he didn't understand something and hated it, so he did as he always did and snapped, "What does it matter!? Tell me the source of this plague, Nooroo!"

Sighing, Nooroo hovered around the Ladybug article, "Master, there is a difference between, say, Stormy Weather controlling the arc and flow of lightning through the powers of her Akuma and her using magic to hasten the creation of a storm from already existing weather phenomena."

Gabriel's analytical mind was thankfully working as he countered "The Miracle Cure healed damaged property and broken bones after Stoneheart, clearly it doesn't just address magical matters."

"Very astute master," Gabriel was glaring again so Nooroo hastened to add. "But what the Miracle Cure did was restore things to their natural state, it did not heal those already sick or injured by other means merely the magical battle. That is the greatest and most unspoken weakness of the Ladybug, if something is already 'pure' then it matters not if it is good or bad, it cannot be purified out of existence, because its existence is pure."

Rubbing is chin, Gabriel hummed, "So if Ladybug can only restore things to their pure state, and the introduction of Akuma energies introduce impurities, then DNA-Dominator must have only used the Akuma energies to create the basis for this plague, but made it self perpetuating without magic, is that right?"

"Yes master, exactly! Had the connection remained the Akuma energies would have continued to suffuse it but with it broken and before Ladybug could even attach her magic to the initial disruption this DNA virus will have been able to infect a host and become a naturalized part of the cosmos. At least if it did not rely on magic to work at all, thus-"

"You are saying this is my fault?" Gabriel snapped.

Nooroo swallowed, "I never said.. Those words..."

Snorting Gabriel returned to his pacing, "Two questions remain, how did it infect me and how can I fix this?"

A relieved sigh slipped from Nooroo's mouth even as dread coiled in their core.

"The first is easy to answer, master, mine is the power of transmission, and through your connection with the target they may have inadvertently sent the disease to you via the bond you share with the Akuma."

"Has this always been possible!?"

"Yes, but only, I mean, if uh, the Akuma is very unique?" Or more accurately if Gabriel understood how the Butterflies power worked half as well as he always insisted he did.

The man glared, but as was typical when hearing something he didn't like but stubbornly refused to engage with, he powered through, "And to cure it!?"

"Well, the Miracle Cure cannot, this is outside of its domain. You could create another Akuma that invents a cure, but given how easily these matters can slip away from an Akuma that may create more problems than solve them. We wouldn't want another zombie plague like the Inca dealt with would we?"

Nooroo really hoped it wasn't already zombies, that had been awful.

Gabriel looked briefly intrigued and then concerned, before the anger returned, "You mean to tell me I cannot even chance a solution to this plague, and that Ladybug cannot cure it so we simply have to live with this new nightmarish state of affairs!?"

Nooroo drew back with every yelled word until they were pressed against the computer screen, much like a butterfly to be dissected. "I mean... how bad is it?"

Gabriel grabbed Nooroo in one hand and thrust them towards one of the screens they had blazed past earlier, howling, "It is that bad!"

The article title read: How Α-Ω (Alpha & Ωmega) Spreads & re-wires our DNA!

Nooroo stared uncomprehendingly at the screen, before saying.

"Master, I don't know what an Omegaverse is."

Prologue End

Notes:

So, this started off as an extrapolation from a joke in an entirely different oneshot. Chloe referenced the "There was only one bed" trope & when Lila didn't get the fanfiction reference dropped the subject. Someone then suggested Chloe dragging Lila through an explanation of all major fanfiction tropes and genres, including the Omegaverse and even involved a jokey idea of someone Akumatizing and trying to make that a reality to prove who would be what. The idea sat with me as an interesting thought exercise in terms of how that could even happen without making the Butterfly more overpowered, or the Miracle Cure randomly not work. I ended up hitting on this explanation, where a confluence of factors need to come about from Ladybug not being around to attach her magic to the situation, the disease in question being able to operate without magic and Gabriel withdrawing the Akuma energies but not taking any action to destroy what they created or effect, allowing the disease to run wild. I should also note, the doctor, butterfly & Gabriel are all patient zero so to speak. The good doctor was leaving the city and very stressed in general so people trolling them about their "Actually very grounded and totally realistic Omegaverse world building" was just the straw that broke the camel's back. Add in they were near an airport and the butterfly was too and well, the disease got ported to a myriad of locations across the world within the first few hours of its conception with no obvious patient zero to blame as no one saw the doctor Akumatize. The doctor knows, but like hell they want to become a lightning rod for all that drama. So yeah, that's how the MLB universe becomes an Omegaverse, and everyone gets to be very stressed about it XD I left the specific rules open-ended so one could port whatever rules they wanted into the premise if someone wanted to explore it as this was mostly a fun thought exercise, thanks for your time! Also thanks to my beta reader, you rock!

#MLB #miraculous ladybug #oneshot #fanfiction #text post #canon divergent au

37 notes · View notes

in-sightjournal · 3 months ago

Text

Ask A Genius 1323: Quantum Entanglement, Informational Cosmology, and the Limits of Computation

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What are the fundamental implications of quantum computing and information in informational cut? Rick Rosner: I do not know much about the mathematics of entangled computation. It involves working with highly entangled quantum states, which allow certain classes of problems to be solved more efficiently than with classical computers when used in quantum computers. The…

#informational cosmology insights #limits of quantum computing #quantum entanglement and computation #Rick Rosner #Scott Douglas Jacobsen

0 notes

arconinternet · 14 days ago

Text

TRIPITAKA 玄奘三蔵求法の旅 (Xuanzang Sanzo's Dharma-Seeking Journey) (Windows/Classic Mac, 1999)

You can download it here or here, and run it on modern systems using this in-browser emulator by dragging the file onto the emulated desktop after it's finished starting up, then opening the TRIPITAKA icon that appears and running the game's icon in the window that appears

This game was considered lost media for years until it was recently obtained and uploaded - you can read about it here.

You can find my post about the game's prequel, Cosmology of Kyoto, here.

25 notes · View notes

wumblr · 6 months ago

Text

do we wanna talk about the google quantum computing researcher who said their work "lends credence to the idea of multiverse cosmology" or shall i just run screaming into the woods again

46 notes · View notes

mayday396 · 2 months ago

Text

Can you imagine Gen Z and Gen Alpha Astronomers and Astronauts that are also Pagans and Astrologers?

"Why Yes I do in fact love Space and I'm part of NASA, also a nerd for the Subfields of Astronomy and it's subdisciplines of Stellar astronomy, Computational astrophysics, and Extragalactic astronomy

As well as Cosmology, Astrobotany, Astrobiology, Spacefaring and Spaceflight

Areospace Engineering and technology

But I can also tell you that your Gemini Rising is at 10 am to 11 am"

If they're in Hellenism, *actively worships Nyx, Selene, Uranus, Astraeus, Iris, Apollo and Artemis*

If they are in Neo-Celtic, and Celtic reconstructionists, *worships Lugh, Sulis, Tuireann*

If they're Asian, "LETS RAID CHANG'ER and HẰNG NGA'S HOME"

#astronomy #astrology #paganism #hellenism #neo celtic #celtic reconstructionism #chinese mythology #vietnamese mythology #astronaut #gen z astronauts #where are the Space hellenists #*doing fuckin Tarot Card readings while on Mars*#*harnessing Chaos Magic WHILE IN SPACE*#astrophysics #botany #witchcraft

13 notes · View notes

turndecassette2 · 1 year ago

Note

I do remember those magic knight people! Every once in a while I go back on your blog to try to track down those drawings because I like them and the concept in the description so much. I would love to hear more about them. Do you have a story planned out?

yeah, vaguely. so for the cosmology; there's this dystopian city I desperately need to draw a map of built above the fossilised remains of an ancient hell. the city mines the hell for 'hell-flesh', a semi-sentient magical substance that's kind of the physical container of the souls of the damned. I suppose this is like fantasy rare earths for fantasy compute or w/e. this has been going on for a while and the city is, kiruna-style, gradually falling down the pit. also as more of the hell is laid bare, semi-autonomous demonic creatures are let loose, maybe as a kind of immune response against human incursion.

(imagining this sort of thing + branching passages. but in the middle of an italian intra-feuding city-state w a population ca modern day singapore)

a kind of grid of bridges and fortresses has been built above the pit to protect the fancier, upper parts of the city from the decaying/descending bits below. the lower city is mostly miners etc & due to the fucked up mutagenic influence of living near a hell & touching hell stuff all day the people in the upper city treat them with suspicion. there's a 'join the US navy-army-whatever to get health insurance & education & basic human dignity' or like french foreign legion situation where by joining the elite magic army manning the little fortresses, ppl from the lower city can gain some access to the upper. in the reverse I guess for the upper city ppl it functions a bit like 'the wall' in asoiaf where criminals, noble bastards etc go to maybe redeem themselves or die horribly.

the fire magic used by the guards to fight demons etc is derived from the burning corpse of a god that is said to have been there since before the founding of the city (presumably the entity responsible for the hell situation in the first place). by swearing fealty to this dead(-ish) god one gets the ability to summon his divine flame but you forfeit your chance at an afterlife, or maybe you go to hell (no-one is quite sure). everyone kind of assumes once the body is fully burned the god will return/reincarnate (and either save or destroy the city, depending on who you ask).

the politics part; at its founding the city was part of some empire that has since collapsed (pretty recently). the city is dependent on trade to stay viable/fed and to appease the new warring states/mini-empires that have sprung up around it. the current ruler is a reclusive young queen & she has her favourite lord/advisor, an ageing academic who is sort of trying to liberalise the place or make it superficially less fashy. other lords dislike this & are working to either find her a proper king or hasten the return of some deity or other that will return the place to its former glory.

I guess the story? has this noble child bastard protagonist from a shady family* of word-mages who is sent to the 'centre' fortress & works her way up to become the apprentice of some hero-knight demon slayer guy with a possibly shady past (I think rn the name I have for the guy is Chaimé & idk if this is a good name? like the spanish jaime but w more e, & the tiny bastard is Myia I think). I imagine her being the sasuke to a happier, more popular girl who saves her from a demon (embarrassing) then is outed as a half-demon herself (she's the redhead in the drawings) & Myia warms up to her as she (demon girl) becomes increasingly isolated from the outside city (being supposedly dangerous or too powerful? I don't think Myia has much natural magic or w/e in her aside from being a nerd & very persistent).

sorry there's a lot here that would be SPOILERS if I ever actually made this into something coherent enough to be an actual comic ha ha. the knight/mentor guy gets dragged into a kind of fantasy 'business plot' & I guess part of that would be like, seeing to what extent he goes along with it & if he's actually a good person ha ha. + there's a bunch of other characters w stuff going on that I haven't figured out the looks of yet but. they're important in my head. the big bear-ish bf guy who gets sent on an expedition down the pit etc

* I have a distinct image of these people living hidden away in some gormenghast-style estate. they've habsburged themselves into being mostly deaf but the only ones around who can fully read/write the divine language that lets them do word-based magic & the other houses kind of have to put up w their weirdness. also scheming nobles in dune using sign language is 1 of my favourite things in the new film adaption & I like the idea of outsiders being forced to learn to sign (or else being cut-off from higher level magic) as some sort of power move? I don't think they involve themselves that much in politics since that's below them but are def part of the 'bring the gods back' thing, for better or worse. anyway after 'avas demon' (GUILTY PLEASURE I know it has such pretty colours but comes from such an unhinged part of the internet, will never stop apologising for this) started posting again I realised it had a character w the same look & vibe so will try and re-design protag girl to look more like this cute person I saw in a fashion post on IG

... let's see how this goes. came up w all this BS after some viz lady at comicon asked me if I wanted to make them a manga but it's grown from being too little to being too unwieldy to pitch. will see after I finish up my current projects. how much blood, swearing & genocide can a story have before it stops being YA. I think chainsaw man is sort of YA but dorohedoro isn't

#I started reading dorohedoro as a teen & I turned out OK #I mean I draw comics I live w my parents in the woods like a medieval peasant etc but that's no worse than the rest of society #these days #god this is a mess #16 yo me loved the bas-lag books #an ask #sorry abt grammar etc this is a lot of words

110 notes · View notes